Archive for wiki

Today, the BayesComp section of ISBA launched its website. It is organised as a wiki and members of the section are strongly incited to take part into the construction of the website. To quote from Peter Green’s introduction:

This new Wikidot site aims to be a community-edited resource on all aspects of Bayesian computation, available for all to read; here ‘community’ means members of the section – we hope that interested members will help us create pages of information and advice to help disseminate new research ideas in an accessible way, and promote good practice. Members can also submit links to a directory of papers, slides, videos and software, and to a diary of upcoming events such as conferences and workshops, all through easy-to-use forms.

Please visit BayesComp, read the Quick Start Guide there, actively contribute to the site’s content, and let us have feedback using the blog facility provided. Once you have editing credentials on the site, you do not need permission to make edits, just do it! Section officers may tidy things up later, if no one else does, but we won’t delete anything unless it is offensive or plainly wrong.

Thanks to the inputs of Peter Green and of Nicolas Chopin, this could be a wonderful exchange tool for the community, but only if this community strives to keep it alive!

Via the [financial and technical] support of Springer, probability and statistics societies are launching a specialised wiki called StatProb. It operates as a wiki in that authors can submit short articles on any topic, with further co-authors joining in later to improve those articles, but with the contents guaranteed via the filter of an editorial board. The members of the board and subsequent associate editors are nominated by the statistical societies involved in the project. (For instance, I was nominated by the Royal Statistical Society., Susie Bayarri by ISBA, George Casella by the ASA, etc.) As a starting basis, StatProb will reproduce a few hundred entries from the incoming International Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences edited by Miodrag Lovric (to which I contributed). Obviously, the wiki will only work if enough contributors submit their piece and make StatProb a reference for statistics. I joined the project because, as opposed to costly encyclopedias, wikis are living things that evolve with the field (if enough activity is maintained by its members) and that can be accessed freely by all. Another good thing about StatProb is that entries are submitted in LaTeX, making the output looking fairly reasonnable. (To start the ball rolling, we submitted this short piece on random number generation with George Casella, exctacted from an older piece that had been sitting around for a while. It does not mean to be the only piece on random number generation, nor on MCMC or Monte Carlo methods. And it can be updated and augmented as in other wikis.) Unless I am confused, I think the site will be officially launched at JSM 2010 in Vancouver this weekend.